I have metnioned in a few posts here lately as I sit with Introducing Radical Orthodoxy about how I am anticipating a discussion about just how an apologetic is best carried out in light of RO’s seemingly basic principle of always being “distinctly Christian”. I know and believe that the church’s best “apologetic” is in its being the church, but what of the seekers and the curious? Are they allowed to ask us, in ways which are “not yet Christian” or “radically not getting it” (which , of course, they aren’t yet)…..how do we make our story intelligible to them in ways which will not actually turn them away; not becuase they are rejecting it (which they might and often do and will at later points), but because they are associating certain theological language and certain “examples” (or lack therof) of theological talk with very little noticable difference on behaviour, selflessness, compassion, and next to no “oppostion to oppressions of various types”; nare even a drop of oppostion to unfettered capitalism and materialism. I think of how Jesus, upon hearing Nicodemus’ quesitons, said “You are not far from the Kingdom of God”.

I also have this concept of the Cosmic Christ which I apply to a stance which to some appears highly “universalist”. The idea that Christ reveals himself across cultures and , ultimately, faiths. It is , at the core, the same Christ, the same faith, but embedded in “foreign” cultures and “traditions”. How else would Christ reveal himslef to them than through means in which they can only identify as having spoken to them through those voices under whom they have learned? It was the story of Gandhi that started me thinking about this, and how he more faithfully lived as Christ taught than many Christians do. He also did so in a tradition wqhich was premodern, I think, even though he was very much out of that tradtion inhis early adulthood until he began to see the injustices and lack-of-being of empire.

Matthew Fox wrote the book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ which got me into more of Fox’s exploration of non-modernist thinking from the pre-Western theologians. I also just noticed (as a link to this RO discussion) that one of these books is Sheer Joy: Conversations With Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality. The linkages to RO concepts here abound, just as I had been long detached from Fox’s writings (another title, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creations Spirituality in New Translation is related as well)

Also from M. Fox: Western Spirituality: Historical Roots, Ecuemnical Routes, (a collection of essays by some Western theologians who reach outside of modernist-dominated theological trends to traditonal voices), and Creation Spirituality. (IN all, I have 12 of Fox’s books—I’ll have to snap a picture of that “stack”)

So this neo-univeralism may be a problem for RO. I don’t know, but I expect that there will be confrontations with that idea to be found. But the larger quesiton of apologetic (the “intellectual” meeting that we want to pull toward less modernistic grounds into “our territory”, and how and where we engage the world is an interesting exploration ahead.